By late May the Mississippi had put the low sections of St. Francisville’s Mahoney Road underwater, but the bluffs of Imahara’s Botanical Garden were high, dry, and possessed of a certain island-ish feel courtesy of the historic high water flooding the bottomlands below. Initiated in 2009, the nascent gardens are well on their way to becoming spectacular, but today we’d come instead to see the extensive collection of haiku, carved in Japanese Kanji characters onto cypress boards by James Imahara, father of garden founder, Walter Imahara. The haiku line the walls of the Imahara Garden’s conference center, each accompanied by an English translation; and that’s where I met Walter Imahara and his sister, Lily Metz.
“He started carving in his seventies,” said Walter, who with Lily, has hung around seventy-five of his father’s boards around the walls of the conference center. By the time he died in 2000, James Imahara had written more than two hundred of these seventeen-syllable poems of the Japanese spirit, carving each into resilient cypress using only a chisel and a mallet. Why did he begin so late? Because during the turbulent years that came before, Imahara had had neither the time nor the peace to undertake the task. Born in California to Japanese immigrants in 1903, James Imahara farmed near Sacramento until 1942 when he, his wife Haruka and eight small children were all interned in one of the United States’ infamous Japanese-American war relocation camps. The family spent several years confined to a camp in Arkansas, where a ninth child was born. Upon their release they made their way to New Orleans, where the family eked out a living for several years until James Imahara, an accomplished horticulturalist, was asked to come to St. Francisville to serve as head gardener at Afton Villa. It was not until many years later, with his ten children educated and grown and his Baton Rouge landscaping company flourishing, that James was able to find the inner piece to return to the study of haiku.
And here they are, arranged chronologically and dating from the early ‘eighties until 2000—the year of James’ death. “This one reads ‘Happy to be alive,’ ” notes Walter, pointing to one of the last in the series. “He was ninety-seven.”
Asked to point out a favorite among their father’s haikus, Walter and Lily hesitate, but finally settle on a tall board with characters etched in black and red. The translation reads:
My father and mother Gratitude higher than mountain Deeper than sea
Imahara’s Botanical Garden is generally open by appointment only. But on June weekends the garden will open for Crape Myrtle Magic, when all twenty-five varieties of crape myrtles planted here are expected to be in full bloom. Saturdays and Sundays from May 28—July 3.
